I think of myself as a technomoderate. While I sit at a computer for some time nearly every day, I do so selectively. I email regularly, blog periodically, and update my website from time to time. I surf the New York Times daily, and Facebook weekly. While writing, I invariably call upon google or amazon to help me find a source or research an idea. In all, I use the web in moderation, to get the job done, while living most of my life in the real world—or so I thought. Then we spent two weeks at the end of the summer without an internet connection. Two weeks?
One day in August, the satellite dish stopped working. It simply refused to send our signals or receive those from afar. Was it clouds? The skies were clear. Over-grown trees? We trimmed. A shift in dish position? The technicians tried several before concluding that we needed a new transponder. Time required to order, deliver, and install: two weeks.
Two weeks. I wasn’t on vacation, or on the road. I was home, where all of the farmwork, artwork, and bookwork happens. I had proofs in hand for my next book that needed to be done and delivered, electronically. Two weeks?
Immediately, I felt disoriented. How was I to proceed? I routinely rely on my computer connection, I realized, to organize me. It sets my tasks to do, with its in box, out box, and drop box; its pop ups and sidebars; downloads and documents, blog feeds and posts. It is more than a list; it is a desktop with depth, a room in itself. And as I enter my computer’s room, that room enters me, recreates itself inside of me, as my world.
Yet my computer was strangely quiet. It no longer beeped and blinked at me with news of incoming messages. It was as flat as it looked, no longer a portal into realms peopled with friends and family, experts and strangers; and no longer offering a daily array of thickets to explore. To be plugged in to a virtual world is to be oriented by it, and I hadn’t known to what degree.
As I sat there working on my proofs, I began to notice other web-induced dependencies as well. Even though I knew we had no connection, my eyes would still invariably drift over to the mail icon checking for that rousing red dot that signals a waiting note. Nothing.
The drift followed a pattern. It happened when I felt stuck, unsure, bored, overwhelmed, dismayed, or in need of a break. It happened when I was worried by a thought, or by the absence of thoughts. When my brain felt too full or too empty, I looked for the dot, for a quick fix, a quick fill. I couldn’t tolerate a moment of blank space or a moment of unknowing.
I also began to notice that this attention-drift extended beyond my time spent sitting with a screen. When moving about the house, thoughts of that red dot would flash in my brain and body. I would feel a gravitational pull towards the computer. My feet would move, my torso turn, and my head tilt, as expectation welled within. So many of my preferred pathways through the house, I realized, took me within arms length of those computer keys.
I noticed too how the times I thought to tap were similar in their emotional makeup to those I had identified while sitting. It was when I was tired or bored, overexcited or overwhelmed, needing a buzz or needing a break. The patterns of sensing and responding to my own emotions were the same. Only rarely was I impelled to the computer, for example, by an impulse to communicate with a specific person about a particular topic. More often I just wanted a blast of something from somewhere or someone. Anything. Anywhere. Anyone.
As the days wore on, the pings and pangs softened, and it was clear. I had been relying on my computer connection for more than mere orientation. I had been using it to manage my energy and emotions. I relied on those beeps and blinks for comfort and consolation; for a jolt awake or a calming touch. I activated that connection to get myself moving, prop myself up, and keep myself going; to stimulate, placate, and regulate, so I could deliver a steady stream of attention and effort to where it was needed most. It was an unconscious habit and a conscious practice; a reflex and a choice. I did it, because I wanted to, or so I thought. Until I couldn’t.
Within a week of our internet blackout, the sense of disorientation gave way to a sense of profound relief. I was free. No longer preoccupied with the latest thread and flame, I was more mine than before, more connected in a robust sensory way. I was moving inside myself in a sensory space that seemed bigger, spacious, as if cleared of an unwelcome horde. I was more willing to receive and follow my own impulses to move, because I couldn’t not.
I began to wonder: does the internet give me what I so often want from it?
Most of the time, what I most want is presence—I want more energy, more vitality, more fun. I want to feel connected with myself, my work, and with those I love. I want to feel that rush of being in the flow of creating something that has value in a larger world. Wanting so to move and feel myself moving, I move my eyes across a dazzling array of sights (and sounds), looking for something that will move me.
More often than not, what I find exhausts me further. For what I need is not more sitting and staring. I need to bring my senses to life and stir my own physio-spiritual energies, so that I can feel feelings, think thoughts, and be a place where life is at work, creating. I would be better served by dropping to the floor for pushups or a downward dog, rather than trailing another political intrigue.
*
We humans crave movement. We crave sensations of life moving through us, moving as us, creating because of us. It is why we climb mountains and run marathons, plan projects and set goals, dream dreams and make love, have kids and travel the world. We want to live.
Yet we are also cautious and risk-averse. We don’t want to lose the sources of comfort we have in accomplishments past, friends counted, or games won. So we prefer to be moved, pursuing life as a spectator sport. We move virtually, vicariously, forgetting what it feels like to move ourselves. The more we forget, the harder it gets to do otherwise. Until the dish breaks.
*
The technician returned. The dish is fixed. I am connected, but differently. For now I know, once again, that what I most want is to move.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Hanging a clothesline and other movement matters
It has been three weeks since I did it: I hung a clothesline.
In the end, it was easy. I took the cotton cord Geoff bought at the local hardware store, walked into the backyard, and strung the line between two obliging birch trees. Five minutes later, the deed was done.
I had been waiting to hang the line, however, for months. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t manage to get out the door. On the one hand, I was so tired of the queasy disease that erupted in my belly every time I pushed the “on” button of our electric dryer. I know too much about how much electricity my dryer consumes (up to 12% of the household tally), in order to do the work that sun and wind can do for free, without cost to the environment, just steps beyond the wall.
On the other hand, I was hemmed in by habit, and by lingering doubts as to whether or not line drying would be as cool or as convenient as plug, press, and spin. Finally, the resistance overrode the ruts, and pushed me out the door with cord, clothespins, and hamper in hand. My kids came along, cheering me on, eager to participate. I wondered how long this festive air would last.
*
To hang my first shirts, I reach into a bag for wooden pins that look exactly like ones my grandparents must have used. Generations collapse. I lift the clothes to the line, and place the clip, then another. Piece by piece, I lift and stretch and smooth.
As the line fills with clothes, niggling doubts flood my mind. I should be using a dryer. I smile at my cultural conditioning. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone hung clothes to dry. Then came the marketing campaigns of the 1950s, urging people to Live Better Electrically. The meaning of a clothesline shifted. No longer a useful implement for drying laundry, it became a waving flag alerting all who could see that those living here were poor, behind the times, and unable to keep up.
Since then, the clothesline has been a social stigma, legally banned in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the United States for being aesthetically unappealing, a drain on property values, a blight to the neighborhood. It is most often a question of class.
Since 2007, Susan Taylor has been fighting her homeowner's association for the right to hang a line. On July 26, 2008, a man died in Verona, Mississippi when his neighbor, tired of asking him not to hang his clothes, shot him.
Yet, as I make my way down the line to the second birch tree, I remind myself. Times are changing, and so is the meaning of the clothesline. Increasingly, the clothesline is a sign of freedom—the freedom to resist patterns of consumption that are fueling our ecological crisis. It is a sign of a commitment to reduce the energy we use to wear and wash, and its attendant costs. I want to stay in touch with my freedom.
Recently, Colorado joined Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, Florida, and Utah in passing a right-to-dry act; other states are following suit. In March 2010, British filmmaker Steven Lake released a documentary, Drying for Freedom, based on the Verona murder and more. Susan Taylor has received national and international media coverage for her three-year battle.
A recent survey from the Pew Foundation found that the percentage of Americans who believe that a clothes dryer is a necessity (rather than a luxury) declined by 17%, a drop in status second only to the microwave.
Once a sign of being unable to afford a dryer, a clothesline is a sign that we can no longer afford the environmental cost of operating one.
*
I empty the laundry basket and step back to survey the array. Shirts of assorted sizes hang shoulder to shoulder; pants jog in the breeze. Sheets flutter, socks flap, and towels hang heavy. There is pleasure in the patterns of shape and color, and in the movement that reveals the movement of the breeze I now sense blowing against my cheeks. The sun is warm. The grass soft beneath my feet.
As the day passes, I peek out the window. The clothes are still there, waving away, like so many Tibetan prayer flags, honoring the earth. They are drying, all by themselves, without the sound of an electric motor. Without chemical odor. So much work is being done for so little. I love it.
Later in the afternoon I go outside again, take a breath, and take down the clothes. They are slightly stiff. Sun-baked and wind-swept. They fold crisply into piles like so many leaves.
I like this. I am surprised at how much I do. It is the relief of not hearing the noise. It is the occasion to go outside. It is the smell of the fresh clothes. It is the money and energy and earth I am saving. But more than any of these, what makes the experience remarkable to me is the reminder it yields about movement.
Now, as I do laundry, I can move. I reach and twist, bend over, sink down, and rise again, folding and unfolding a bodily self that has spent more than enough of the day sitting at a computer. It is the movement of walking outside, of responding to the whims and whorls of nature, of being present to this place. It is the movement of aligning my efforts with the rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, heat and cold, in ways that pace my efforts and nourish my sensory self.
*
This clothesline and my unexpectedly enthusiastic response to it have got me thinking. So many of our labor and time saving devices work to save us labor and time by reducing our opportunities for moving our bodily selves. Yet in the name of granting us pleasure, they deprive us of a primary source of it—moving our bodily selves. In the name of protecting us from the inconveniences of the natural world, they separate us from its nourishing effects.
When we move we breathe; when we breathe we feel; when we feel we have resources for thinking and feeling in new ways. We bring our senses to life. We bring sense to life.
Of course, we want to believe that our labor and time saving devices are giving us the freedom to move however we want to, whenever we want, to get that pleasure pure and unhampered by practical concerns.
However, the reality is that once we separate our immense capacity to move our bodily selves from our requirements for living, our bodily movement no longer carries the same significance it once had. Movement is then about entertainment or recreation or physical health; we no longer perceive it or value it as essential to our mental and spiritual well being, or as a key to creating a mutually enabling relationship with the natural world. Movement drops as a priority in our lives, falling in rank below the “necessary” tasks of school and work, screen time and the effort of maintaining all of our time and labor saving devices. We find it difficult to motivate ourselves to move, and cannot figure out why.
*
I have been looking over my blog entries for the past two and a half years. I see a pattern. Every fall, I have made a new move, reinventing my blog to focus on a different aspect of my project. I spent the first nine months laying out the structure of What a Body Knows, before devoting a year to telling Farm Stories, and another to Making Connections between my work in What a Body Knows and cultural conversations in the news.
It is time to string a new line. The sense of needing to make a change is overriding my habitual approach. In the next few months, I will be focusing more specifically on movement—human movement, bodily movement.
I want to explore how we are moving and what we are creating when we do. I want to investigate what movements we evolved to make and why we can; what movements we have the potential to make and why we should. I want to explore how vital our practices of movement are for creating a mutually enabling relationship to the natural world. I want to write about dance.
It’s time to hang some new thoughts, air them out, and give them time to flap in the breeze.
In the end, it was easy. I took the cotton cord Geoff bought at the local hardware store, walked into the backyard, and strung the line between two obliging birch trees. Five minutes later, the deed was done.
I had been waiting to hang the line, however, for months. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t manage to get out the door. On the one hand, I was so tired of the queasy disease that erupted in my belly every time I pushed the “on” button of our electric dryer. I know too much about how much electricity my dryer consumes (up to 12% of the household tally), in order to do the work that sun and wind can do for free, without cost to the environment, just steps beyond the wall.
On the other hand, I was hemmed in by habit, and by lingering doubts as to whether or not line drying would be as cool or as convenient as plug, press, and spin. Finally, the resistance overrode the ruts, and pushed me out the door with cord, clothespins, and hamper in hand. My kids came along, cheering me on, eager to participate. I wondered how long this festive air would last.
*
To hang my first shirts, I reach into a bag for wooden pins that look exactly like ones my grandparents must have used. Generations collapse. I lift the clothes to the line, and place the clip, then another. Piece by piece, I lift and stretch and smooth.
As the line fills with clothes, niggling doubts flood my mind. I should be using a dryer. I smile at my cultural conditioning. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone hung clothes to dry. Then came the marketing campaigns of the 1950s, urging people to Live Better Electrically. The meaning of a clothesline shifted. No longer a useful implement for drying laundry, it became a waving flag alerting all who could see that those living here were poor, behind the times, and unable to keep up.
Since then, the clothesline has been a social stigma, legally banned in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the United States for being aesthetically unappealing, a drain on property values, a blight to the neighborhood. It is most often a question of class.
Since 2007, Susan Taylor has been fighting her homeowner's association for the right to hang a line. On July 26, 2008, a man died in Verona, Mississippi when his neighbor, tired of asking him not to hang his clothes, shot him.
Yet, as I make my way down the line to the second birch tree, I remind myself. Times are changing, and so is the meaning of the clothesline. Increasingly, the clothesline is a sign of freedom—the freedom to resist patterns of consumption that are fueling our ecological crisis. It is a sign of a commitment to reduce the energy we use to wear and wash, and its attendant costs. I want to stay in touch with my freedom.
Recently, Colorado joined Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, Florida, and Utah in passing a right-to-dry act; other states are following suit. In March 2010, British filmmaker Steven Lake released a documentary, Drying for Freedom, based on the Verona murder and more. Susan Taylor has received national and international media coverage for her three-year battle.
A recent survey from the Pew Foundation found that the percentage of Americans who believe that a clothes dryer is a necessity (rather than a luxury) declined by 17%, a drop in status second only to the microwave.
Once a sign of being unable to afford a dryer, a clothesline is a sign that we can no longer afford the environmental cost of operating one.
*
I empty the laundry basket and step back to survey the array. Shirts of assorted sizes hang shoulder to shoulder; pants jog in the breeze. Sheets flutter, socks flap, and towels hang heavy. There is pleasure in the patterns of shape and color, and in the movement that reveals the movement of the breeze I now sense blowing against my cheeks. The sun is warm. The grass soft beneath my feet.
As the day passes, I peek out the window. The clothes are still there, waving away, like so many Tibetan prayer flags, honoring the earth. They are drying, all by themselves, without the sound of an electric motor. Without chemical odor. So much work is being done for so little. I love it.
Later in the afternoon I go outside again, take a breath, and take down the clothes. They are slightly stiff. Sun-baked and wind-swept. They fold crisply into piles like so many leaves.
I like this. I am surprised at how much I do. It is the relief of not hearing the noise. It is the occasion to go outside. It is the smell of the fresh clothes. It is the money and energy and earth I am saving. But more than any of these, what makes the experience remarkable to me is the reminder it yields about movement.
Now, as I do laundry, I can move. I reach and twist, bend over, sink down, and rise again, folding and unfolding a bodily self that has spent more than enough of the day sitting at a computer. It is the movement of walking outside, of responding to the whims and whorls of nature, of being present to this place. It is the movement of aligning my efforts with the rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, heat and cold, in ways that pace my efforts and nourish my sensory self.
*
This clothesline and my unexpectedly enthusiastic response to it have got me thinking. So many of our labor and time saving devices work to save us labor and time by reducing our opportunities for moving our bodily selves. Yet in the name of granting us pleasure, they deprive us of a primary source of it—moving our bodily selves. In the name of protecting us from the inconveniences of the natural world, they separate us from its nourishing effects.
When we move we breathe; when we breathe we feel; when we feel we have resources for thinking and feeling in new ways. We bring our senses to life. We bring sense to life.
Of course, we want to believe that our labor and time saving devices are giving us the freedom to move however we want to, whenever we want, to get that pleasure pure and unhampered by practical concerns.
However, the reality is that once we separate our immense capacity to move our bodily selves from our requirements for living, our bodily movement no longer carries the same significance it once had. Movement is then about entertainment or recreation or physical health; we no longer perceive it or value it as essential to our mental and spiritual well being, or as a key to creating a mutually enabling relationship with the natural world. Movement drops as a priority in our lives, falling in rank below the “necessary” tasks of school and work, screen time and the effort of maintaining all of our time and labor saving devices. We find it difficult to motivate ourselves to move, and cannot figure out why.
*
I have been looking over my blog entries for the past two and a half years. I see a pattern. Every fall, I have made a new move, reinventing my blog to focus on a different aspect of my project. I spent the first nine months laying out the structure of What a Body Knows, before devoting a year to telling Farm Stories, and another to Making Connections between my work in What a Body Knows and cultural conversations in the news.
It is time to string a new line. The sense of needing to make a change is overriding my habitual approach. In the next few months, I will be focusing more specifically on movement—human movement, bodily movement.
I want to explore how we are moving and what we are creating when we do. I want to investigate what movements we evolved to make and why we can; what movements we have the potential to make and why we should. I want to explore how vital our practices of movement are for creating a mutually enabling relationship to the natural world. I want to write about dance.
It’s time to hang some new thoughts, air them out, and give them time to flap in the breeze.
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